The longer you push, the more rest you need. And if you don't make the time, your body will take the time! It's remarkable how much easier life becomes when you let the swing go the other way sometimes.

* You'll hear me begin this clip with "Core Principle #4" - it's an excerpt from a discussion about the foundational principles of Fascial Flow Method™: the body-based brain-hacking exercises + strategies I designed to quickly and easily downshift from chaos / survival mode to calm / healing mode. Stay tuned for an online course I'm creating to share more of this work with you at home ;)

** Please forgive the difficult audio quality - such is life with live...

So in all of my best thinking and research and consulting with the smartest people I know and meditating and praying...the one thing that I was CERTAIN of is that I needed to stop.

Stop having commitments. Stop trying to accomplish things. Stop future-pacing (living my present in service to a specific future). Stop...

2010: After 10 years of chronic pain and mysterious progressive neurological symptoms, found out my brain was herniated into my neck (likely a result of many head traumas). Declined surgery, and began the process of innovating a noninvasive solution for greater healing than I was ever told to expect. Also graduated as a Doctor of Chiropractic!

2011: ...

When we can’t figure out how to flow, how to roll with the crazy rollercoaster of life, we freeze. We splint. It’s a built-in resource, an intelligent instinctual reaction we unconsciously use. It’s meant to buy us time to figure out how to respond. When we freeze in place, we can deal with the ‘known’ rather than the ‘unknown’ of flowing in response to whatever is thrown our way.

This bracing happens on both a physical and energetic level (largely through fascia, but that is a conversation for another day). It can be in response to an emotional or energetic overwhelm, or in response to a physical overwhelm, or both.

But what happens when...

Lately a lot of people have been asking me, 'How are you feeling?' and I often give a cursory answer because, really, it's too much to dive into most of the time. But the other day when at dinner with one of my best friends, I fell to pieces. As I recounted a stressful recent visit with family, I found myself in the middle of a powerful AHA moment.

This moment parallels with conversations I've had multiples times today with clients as well...the theme revolves around feeling that we push so hard to do all the things and pick up all the pieces and just BE OKAY in social and business situations that we end up feeling that others don't understand the amount of duress we're experiencing (and treat us as if we are simply being picky or like a 'princess' when we actually do fall apart, set boundaries, or ask for consideration).

For me, this looks like...

Resilience is not about a resistance to stress, but rather the ability to roll with it - to have a response and then return to center unharmed. It's all about shifting from REACTIVE mode to RESPONSIVE mode. This is where we find true adaptability to life's unavoidable stressors. In the previous analogy of treading water with a backpack full of rocks (stressors), adaptability and resilience are about how strong your legs can swim to keep you afloat.

When we have more rocks in that backpack than our legs can keep afloat, the body succumbs to illness (like cancer).

So how can we increase adaptability to stress? I can think of 3 primary ways:

• Downshift fight-or-flight aka survival mode in the brain

• Make sure brain-body...

When faced with a health crisis, most doctors focus on how to help the patient survive. With cancer, traditional Western medicine (and even many holistic approaches) attempts to 'kill the cancer' or 'eliminate the tumor'. It's an emergency mode reaction that pays no attention to the processes that allowed this tumor (or tumors) to grow in the first place.

And honestly, I'm not here for that. I have no interest in chasing tumors and cancer cells - either with poisonous chemo or a surgeon's knife.

I also have no interest in simply "surviving". What kind of life is that?

Because this is about so much more than these confused cells growing and gnawing...

But then I think of all the head injuries I’ve had (a ridiculous number). And the chronic infections, like Lyme, in my brain.

Sometimes I say that I won the brain lottery, having had not only brain infection but brain herniation outside the base of my skull - and countless concussions since then. And navigating the healing process through these indescribably difficult challenges HAS become my identity. My identity as a healer, as a sherpa of sorts for others navigating health crises.

But this. This feels like a failure. I have often cited the statistic that “1 in every 3 women in this country gets...